Thalen & Thalen

pure!

Frozen Morning Light...

Ideas for a vessel...

Waking up one morning, looking across the grass behind the house, I see a million sparkles of ice crystals. It is as if these little sparkles float above the surface and I wonder; can I get this “image” caught into the design of a silver vessel?

A little later the sketching process starts, the thinking and design process.

During that morning observation in November there was another element that attracted us, with the movement of the sun the image of the ice crystals changed, as if there was a movement. Could I make movement visible in a “still” object.

From all the sketches and scribbles just a few are good enough to be used as a base for further designs

and we find an answer on the question of the light reflections,  diamonds....

It turns out that we need approximately 28 kilo’s of silver in one sheet that needs to be more than double the size we can order.... This means that we have to fuse elements together and roll this big sheet to a cylinder and fuse the ends together again and all this in an invisible way.

In the raising and hammering process that comes next we will have to create a core, that most likely cannot be removed after the hammering process will be finished.

In the mean time we did find a way to make the diamonds float above the surface of the vessel. They will be mounted in little tubes that will be mounted in the wall of the vessel and will give the possibility to have light passing through...

There was just one little detail we hadn’t covered (or in fact two)... We didn’t have access to three hundred diamonds needed for the project, nor did we have the approximately 30 kilo’s of silver.

We found two partners to cover the material needs. A good friend of us offered to supply the funds needed for the silver and we came in contact with the IGC Group - diamond cutters for over 100 years - who embraced our idea and designs and were willing to help us...

So far... the rest was hammering, hammering and more hammering

rob & jaap